Chapter 8 Flashcards
compound data type
A data type in which the values are made up of components, or elements, that are themselves values.
default value
The value given to an optional parameter if no argument for it is provided in the function call.
docstring
A string constant on the first line of a function or module definition (and as we will see later, in class and method definitions as well). Docstrings provide a convenient way to associate documentation with code. Docstrings are also used by programming tools to provide interactive help.
dot notation
Use of the dot operator, ., to access methods and attributes of an object.
immutable data value
A data value which cannot be modified. Assignments to elements or slices (sub-parts) of immutable values cause a runtime error.
index
A variable or value used to select a member of an ordered collection, such as a character from a string, or an element from a list.
mutable data value
A data value which can be modified. The types of all mutable values are compound types. Lists and dictionaries are mutable; strings and tuples are not.
optional parameter
A parameter written in a function header with an assignment to a default value which it will receive if no corresponding argument is given for it in the function call.
short-circuit evaluation
A style of programming that shortcuts extra work as soon as the outcome is know with certainty. In this chapter our find function returned as soon as it found what it was looking for; it didn’t traverse all the rest of the items in the string.
slice
A part of a string (substring) specified by a range of indices. More generally, a subsequence of any sequence type in Python can be created using the slice operator (sequence[start:stop]).
traverse
To iterate through the elements of a collection, performing a similar operation on each.
whitespace
Any of the characters that move the cursor without printing visible characters. The constant string.whitespace contains all the white-space characters.
